The Great Geek Manual News

Mike Piscetelli was a fan of the Kindle e-book reader even before the pipes in his New Jersey home burst and destroyed his library of more than 500 books.

Now he’s turning his back on paperbacks in favour of their digital successors.

“From now on, I’m going to carry my library with me wherever I go,” the 44-year-old salesman from Princeton said, vowing to use his insurance money to replace his library with e-books that can be read on the Amazon.com Inc. device.

“No more bookshelves … and God forbid my Kindle gets destroyed, I can still back up all that information off Amazon. Anyone who says anything bad about the Kindle has never used a Kindle.”

Amazon’s first Kindle e-book reading device – launched in November, 2007 – was hailed as a watershed moment for the digital book market. But many observers remain unconvinced that book lovers will be willing to ditch paper pages for digital ones the way music fans abandoned CDs for MP3s.

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Source: The Globe and Mail

Writer Stephanie Meyer isn’t too happy with the Internet. The first 12 chapters of her eagerly awaited book, a counter-view novel to Twilight, has hit file sharing sites. Despite knowing who was responsible, Meyer’s anger seems only to be for her Internet fans, while she plans to cancel the book.

This year we’ve reported on several book authors who embraced the Internet, and BitTorrent in particular. Having pirated copies of their books listed on BitTorrent sites such as The Pirate Bay is considered to be an honor to some. They use it as a promotional tool, and actually sell more books because of it.

One of the prime examples is best-selling author Paulo Coelho, who said he sold thousands of extra books because of he pirated his own books. “Sharing is part of the human condition. A person who does not share is not only selfish, but bitter and alone,” Coelho told TorrentFreak in a follow up interview, explaining why he decided to share his books for free.

Responses to unauthorized filesharing vary. Those that have embraced it have seen dividends. Others fight it and throw tantrums, or use it as an excuse. A prime example of the last category has emerged, in the form of author Stephanie Meyer. Meyer, best known for her recent hits based around vampires, caters to the ‘young adult’ market re-popularized by the Harry Potter books.

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Source: Torrent Freak

Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of machines are uncannily similar to Chinese originals and were undoubtedly derived from them, a British amateur historian says in a newly-published book.

Gavin Menzies sparked headlines across the globe in 2002 with the claim that Chinese sailors reached America 70 years before Christopher Columbus. Now he says a Chinese fleet brought encyclopedias of technology undiscovered by the West to Italy in 1434, laying the foundation for the engineering marvels such as flying machines later drawn by Italian polymath Leonardo.

“Everything known to the Chinese by the year 1430 was brought to Venice,” said Menzies, a retired Royal Navy submarine commander, in an interview at his north London home.

From Venice, a Chinese ambassador went to Florence and presented the material to Pope Eugenius IV, Menzies says.

“I argue in the book that this was the spark that really ignited the renaissance and that Leonardo and (Italian astronomer) Galileo built on what was brought to them by the Chinese.

“Leonardo basically redrew everything in three dimensions, which made a vast improvement.”

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Source: Reuters

Simon & Schuster’s deal with Amazon to more than double the number of Simon & Schuster titles for the Kindle e-book reader shows that mainstream publishers are taking the e-book market seriously. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezo said Kindle customers’ total Amazon.com purchases increase by 2.6 times after they buy a Kindle e-book reader.

Amazon and Simon & Schuster have inked a deal to bring 5,000 new titles to the Kindle e-book reader this year. Amazon’s Kindle is a portable e-book reader that wirelessly downloads books, blogs, magazines, newspapers and personal documents to a high-resolution electronic paper.

Simon & Schuster’s latest e-book initiative will more than double the number of the publisher’s titles currently available on Kindle. Kindle customers will be able to discover, buy and read popular books such as Stephen R. Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

When added to books already available on Kindle, including thousands of new releases and bestsellers, these Simon & Schuster titles represent the vast majority of the publisher’s catalog.

“This announcement is significant because it just indicates this wave is gathering momentum. It’s another step on the accelerator,” said Phil Leigh, senior analyst at Inside Digital Media. “Simon & Schuster is a major publishing house. So this indicates that mainstream publishers are increasingly taking e-books seriously.”

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Source: News Factor

Paulo Coelho, author of books such as “The Alchemist” and “The Witch of Portobello”, sold over 100 million books last year. In part, he puts this success down to BitTorrent, as he saw a huge increase in sales when his books appeared on sites such as The Pirate Bay. We talked to Coelho to find out more about this remarkable story.

“Since the dawn of time, human beings have felt the need to share - from food to art. Sharing is part of the human condition. A person who does not share is not only selfish, but bitter and alone,” Coelho told TorrentFreak, explaining why he decided to share his books for free.

His urge to share received quite a lot of attention after Coelho started a weblog with the name Pirate Coelho a few months ago. His motivation? He wanted people to have the opportunity to ‘try’ his books for free, but he knew some of his publishers wouldn’t agree right away. So, he took matters into his own hands and put his own books onto BitTorrent, FTP sites and Rapidshare.

“There was a strong reaction when I mentioned the site at Digital Life Design, back in January 2008,” Coelho explains. “The blog was out there for a while, but it seems that nobody from the publishing world was paying attention to it. When I spoke about it, all eyes were aimed at the site. From that moment on, based on actual numbers, the publishers not only accepted it, but helped me.”

“Harper Collins, for example, decided to offer a new book of mine every month, for free reading.” This, together with the pirated copies worked out really well, and the book sales went up. “If you go to the New York Times Bestseller list, you’ll see that the Alchemist jumped to the #6, and the Witch of Portobello is in the extended list.”

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Source: Torrent Freak

A German publisher said it will print a book containing thousands of entries of the online user-edited encyclopedia Wikipedia.

Bertelsmann said the book to appear in September will include 50,000 of the most commonly used Wikipedia contributions.

In a statement, Bertelsmann said the action hopes to “reach new target groups which will get to know the Wikipedia project,” reports AFP.

As part of the publishing arrangement, for each $31.95 book sold, one euro will be donated to Wikimedia, the organization which directs Wikipedia and other projects.

Source: All Headline News

A U.S. and British library plan to reproduce online all 75 editions of William Shakespeare’s plays printed in the quarto format before the year 1641.

The Bodleian Library in Oxford and Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC have joined forces to download their collections, building on the work of the British Library which digitized its collection of quarto editions in 2004.

In the absence of surviving manuscripts, the quartos — Shakespeare’s earliest printed editions — offer the closest known evidence of what Shakespeare might actually have written, and what appeared on the early modern English stage.

The project is designed to make all of the quartos, many of which are only accessible to scholars, available to the wider public.

The process of downloading the quartos will begin next month and take a year to complete.

Online visitors will be able to compare images side-by-side, lay one facsimile on top of the other, search plays and mark and tag the texts.

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Source: Reuters via Yahoo! News

No Starch Press and Wired’s news editor Leander Kahney have released free copies of “The Cult of Mac” and “The Cult of iPod” on the Pirate Bay. Publishing music, movies and books on BitTorrent seems to be becoming a trend, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

The success of the best selling author Paulo Coelho, who posted several of his books on BitTorrent, has inspired the publisher and Leander Kahney -the author of the two books- to do the same.

No Starch Press’ Bill Pollock uploaded the torrent to The Pirate Bay himself, as he writes: “I think that publishers (music and book) are spending too much time circling the wagons and not enough time thinking of ways that they can use technology to advantage.

“Certainly, our move here is a bit unusual, but someone has to take the plunge. May as well be us. After all, we were the first publishers in the United States to come out publicly against the DMCA. Time to put our money where our mouth is, as they say,” Pollock adds.

We applaud this move of course, and hope that many authors and publishers will do similar experiments. When Paulo Coelho, the best-selling author of “The Alchemist” made his Russian translation available, without consent from his publisher, the sales in Russia went from 1,000 books a year, to over 1,000,000. Who doesn’t want that?

Source: Torrent Freak

JRR Tolkien’s first edition of “The Hobbit” was sold at an auction to an unknown bidder for ?60,000 ($120,000). The offer was twice the amount from the expected bid.

The 1937 edition of Tolkien’s most successful book, established his reputation as an author. This was before the success of “The Lord of The Rings” trilogy.

Tolkien had originally intended for the book to be for his children but after reading the book, Elaine Griffiths recommended it for publication to George Allen & Unwin.

The first edition sold 1,500 copies and has since sold over 100 million copies all over the world.

Source: All Headline News

A book of fairy tales created, handwritten and illustrated by J.K. Rowling sold for nearly $4 million at auction Thursday.

The buyer, Web retailer Amazon.com Inc., now owns one of only seven copies of “The Tales of Beedle the Bard,” which is leather bound with silver mounts.

Amazon, in its unaccustomed position as a buyer rather than seller of books, was represented by London art agent Hazlitt, Gooden and Fox.

The book originally had been expected to sell for about $100,000. The standing-room-only crowd at Sotheby’s auction house applauded as bidding topped the $2 million mark.

The money will benefit The Children’s Voice, a charity co-founded in 2005 by Rowling and Baroness Nicholson, a member of Britain’s House of Lords.

Rowling, 42, watched the auction on the Web from her home in Edinburgh, Scotland, and said she was ecstatic.

“This will mean so much to children in desperate need of help,” she said in a statement. “It means Christmas has come early to me.”

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Source: The Associated Press via Yahoo! News

J.K. Rowling has given fans permission to write sequels to the ‘Harry Potter’ books. The author - whose seven-book series about the young wizard has sold almost 400 million copies - will not take legal action against George Lippert, who wrote a follow-up to Harry’s adventures on his website.

Under copyright laws Lippert could have been prosecuted for his actions. Rowling’s lawyers confirmed she is happy for spin-offs to be published online as long as the publications are not sold and it is made clear she was not involved in the stories. She also requested the follow-ups do not contain pornography or racism.

Meanwhile, Rowling - who has seen the ‘Harry Potter’ books turned into blockbuster movies - has been voted entertainer of the year by Entertainment Weekly magazine.

The publication insisted she deserved the title for getting “people to tote around her big, old-fashioned printed-on-paper books as if they were the hottest new entertainment devices on the planet”.

The magazine also named George Clooney a “valedictorian” because he has “deftly balanced box-office viability with personal responsibility.”

Source: All Headline News

WooHoo! Let the slash fic begin!

The publisher John Wiley & Sons confirmed last week that its book “Black Gold: The New Frontier in Oil for Investors” by George Orwel had lifted almost word for word about five paragraphs from a Wikipedia article on the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia.

The book discusses the 1996 terrorist bombing, which killed 19 United States servicemen, as part of an overview of the situation in the Middle East as it affects the oil supply. Mr. Orwel, who lives in Brooklyn, has written about the industry for a variety of specialized publications; reached at home, he said his publisher’s statement spoke for him.

True to the ever-changing nature of Wikipedia, a comparison of Mr. Orwel’s book, which was published in 2006, and the current article on the bombing would show significant differences. But when compared with a 2005 version — available on a discussion page there about the incident — the text is virtually identical. A typo or two has been fixed, a phrase or two added, and the word “saw” had been changed to “witnessed,” for example.

The principal author of the Wikipedia article, reached via his user page there, wrote in an e-mail message that he considered the damages “insignificant,” and had “made no effort to contact the author or publisher.” He described himself as follows: “I’m male, in my 40s, have a Ph.D. in physics, and work as a professor at a university in California. I view my Wikipedia writings as a form of procrastination from real work, so I’d prefer to remain anonymous and not reveal the extent of my procrastination to colleagues.”

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Source: The New York Times

JK Rowling has completed her first book not to feature the teenaged wizard Harry Potter - but don’t look for it on the best-seller chart.

The British author says only seven copies of The Tales of Beedle the Bard are being printed. One will be auctioned in December to raise money for a children’s charity, while the others have been given away as gifts.

Rowling herself did the drawings for the collection of five magical fairy stories, along with writing the text by hand. In a statement, Rowling said “The Tales of Beedle the Bard is really a distillation of the themes found in the Harry Potter books, and writing it has been the most wonderful way to say goodbye to a world I have loved and lived in for 17 years.”

Bound in brown morocco leather and mounted with silver and semiprecious stones, the book will be auctioned at Sotheby’s on December 13. Starting price will be $62,000. Proceeds will go to The Children’s Voice, a European children’s charity.

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Source:

Random House, the world’s biggest book publisher, is considering joining a book-search project run by Google, once considered an arch-enemy by the paper publishing industry.

The two parties are talking to one another about the less controversial part of Google’s book-scanning project, its partner program, sources with knowledge of the matter told Reuters at this week’s Frankfurt Book Fair.

Google has agreements with more than 10,000 publishers, large and small, who give their books to Google to be scanned in full. Google then makes them partially available — according to agreements with each publisher — for online readers.

It also works with 27 academic and reference library partners to gain access to out-of-print works.

But part of the library project has proved controversial and thrown Google into legal dispute with U.S. publishers as Google also scans works from its U.S. library partners that are still in copyright without asking the publishers first.

Random House, a unit of German media group Bertelsmann, has until now held out and not joined the publisher partner program, which can help boost book sales, especially of publishers’ so-called backlists of older titles.

When asked this week whether the parties were close to an agreement, a Random House spokesman said: “Random House continues to have periodic constructive conversations with Google on issues of mutual relevance.”

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Source: Reuters via Yahoo! News